founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay,
on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of his mills,
still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father's birthplace a
few years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, as
the Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, and
he had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity, and he
came out to America towards the close of the last century to prospect
for these as well as for a good location to manufacture Welsh flannels;
but after being presented to Washington, then President, at
Philadelphia, and buying a tract of land somewhere near the District of
Columbia, his phantom rolls a shadowy barrel of dollars on board ship at
Baltimore, and sails back in the _Flying Dutchman_ to South Wales. I
fancy, from the tradition of the dollars, that he had made good affairs
here with the stock of flannels he brought over with him; but all is
rather uncertain about him, especially the land he bought, though the
story of it is pretty sure to fire some descendant of his in each new
generation with the wish to go down to Washington, and oust the people
there who have unrightfully squatted on the ancestral property. What is
unquestionable is that this old gentleman went home and never came out
here again; but his son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailed
with his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy's father was a year old.
From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in New
York, Virginia, and Ohio, setting up the machinery of woollen mills, and
finally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at the
Boy's Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugs
and books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He had
long ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteous
cause; and brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist
in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's father
restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a
constitutional anti-slavery man. The grandfather was a fervent
Methodist, but the father, after many years of scepticism, had become a
receiver of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg; and in this faith the
children were brought up. It was not only their faith, but their life,
and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious household,
though they